Ditch or re-process?

[neisel]

Water washing?

[dgs]

Thanks for the link to that post neisel.
Dave, in the post you mention 'blue workshop roll' is that the paper stuff like kitchen roll but a bigger roll? Or is it cloth?

So I finally got my dry wash tower packed with shavings and after ditching the Filtertechnik and changing the pipe to go through a 10" 1 micron, I pumped the lot through.
After doing a soap test I got ~568 ppm nearly 10 times the acceptable level.
What to do now?
Could I reduce the soap level by pumping through the wood shavings again?
I would of course wrap the cartridge in blue roll first.
Get some ion exchange resin and try out my ion exchange resin tower?
Or should I just go ahead and water wash?

My first batch that was 10% unreacted that I was going put in my central heating... I put it in my car tank The thing is, the tank is now less than 1/4 full and as I don't want to buy dino again, I really desperate to get this last batch finished off asap.
So what is the quickest way to significantly reduce the soap content?

yes the blue roll is just the blue paper stuff, but it won't remove soap.

Its strange that even after the wood chips the soap is so high, i've never come across that before. The wood method is highly efficient at removing soap, so much so that i remember reducing some soapy bio from around 3000ppm to virtually zero in one pass. don't use any ion exchange, its a waste of money. Try the wood again. Is it hardwood and how much volume are you passing the bio through.

[Ian61]

Ok, so I was just getting set up to wash by misting in my wash tank. I pumped it from the two smaller tanks (apart from the bottom 5 litres in each tank) back through the wood chip and 1 micron cartridge.
Looking into the tanks the bio looked cloudy. Is this the 568 ppm soap in it making it cloudy? It can't be water as I haven't water washed it.
However, before I connected the hosepipe I did another soap test.
Result!
Down from 568 ppm to 169 ppm!
Maybe after the first pass through the wood, the wood hadn't expanded and settled down.
Do I now pump it through the woodchip again to see if it comes down further?
Dave, interesting you say that blue roll won't remove soap, could you elaborate on this. I thought it was about particle size and the finer the filter, the better filtration. I'd heard also that if there was too much soap in the biodiesel it would block the fuel filters on the car. Is there another reason why the soap content must be low, for example it doesn't combust too good?
Yes it is mostly hardwood ~90%, mixed tropical hardwoods and some English hardwoods, so I was told.
As for the volume, the tower is about 3 foot high and 8" in diameter.
It takes very little time and effort to pump through the wood chip tower, I'll do it tomorrow and post the result.

[dgs]

Hi Ian, ok so anything dissolved in the bio cannot be removed by filtering through something like blue roll or even a centrifuge. Filtering it through woodchips is different however. The apertures in the wood are about the correct size for a soap molecule to fit in ( from memory something like 50 angstroms, so 50x 0.0000000001 metre) We are talking atom/molecule sizes here, much different to microns.

Soap will form an ash on the valves which is really difficult to remove. I don't know where the spec of 66ppm came from but using bio at several times this spec (imo) would take years to have any adverse effects on an engine.

High soap in your bio won't be causing the cloudyness. Do a hot pan test for water.

[Ian61]

Another go at pumping through the wood chips has brought the soap down to between 83 and 118 ppm. Looking in the top of the tank I pumped it into, I can now seen the bottom of the tank as it's no longer cloudy.
I pumped it from the top leaving about 75 liters in the conical and I can't see the bottom of this tank.
Does the wood chip dry wash also remove water in the bio?
The spec of 66ppm came from a Utah biodiesel supply Youtube video I watched.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6On5gB6VwA
He says it's the ASTM standard for soap. Maybe we have different names and standards for levels this side of the Atlantic.

 

[dgs]

The soap spec is the same here, our regs are en14214.

Your wooschips won't remove water, but everyone as far as I know doesn't dry if they don't water wash. Does the cloudyness go if heated slightly. In any case I think the bio and fuel pump problems are unrelated.